Maybe the Next Messiah will be a Collective… is a Collective…. maybe its us?
The other day I found myself wishing for Jesus to come back. Not something that crosses my mind much, but I caught myself thinking it. If not Jesus, I thought, then maybe a new anointed one (Messiah) to emerge on the world scene to make things right. Why not! I wondered. Isn’t it time for a little Fleshy Divinity again. Why can’t it be like the good ol days… when God would respond to the cries and chaos of the world with an embodied Messiah. Maybe, a women this time… to settle the argument once and for all about the gender of God. I Also briefly wondered if it was Barak Obama!??! – but that is yet to be seen?
As I worked with my “wishing” a little more, I realized that Divinity is getting fleshy... all the time getting fleshy. That is what the Christian tradition celebrates during Advent - God has a tendency towards fleshy particularity! The universe somehow gets into a grain of sand... and into Bethlehem... and into us. Every time the conditions are right… after a little whoooopy… God seems to actualize that tendency and gets particular. And there are those who are waking up to this reality. The reality of who we really are… and then working like hell to actualize that reality in the particularities of their daily lives. But that isn’t enough it seems. There are gurus, saints and avatars around today, and more waking up all the time… and yet the cries and complexities remain.
So, I wonder if the world we now live in will require more than individual Messiahs to save us from ourselves. Maybe our time requires a collection of Messiahs. A network of the “wide awake.” The world seems too complex and the challenges too global in nature for an individual Messiahs.
This is where I hold out great hope and promise for communities of practice and the spiritual community which Christianity calls the Church. After communion at Covenant (where I worship) we often say, “Every time you eat this bread and drink from this cup you proclaim and remember Christ until he comes again and again and again.” The word “you” is really a “ya’ll” - a collective “we.” Every time “we” eat this bread and drink this cup “we” re-member Christ... “we” re-embody Christ. The church as a collective is the re-membrance and the re-embodiment of Christ in the world. And we are given the same task and responsibility of as Christ to be the vehicle for Kingdom of God in the world, to "be" God’s Shalom.
In John, Christ says to his disciples before his death and fleshy departure, “just as God sent me, so I send you.” It’s a collective you, a ya’ll. Christ is now the collective not the individual. I believe this is true… I trust that this is true. Maybe at one point it was enough for God to just get fleshy in a particular body, but it seems now that all those fleshy particularities must not only wake up to who they really are, but then come together in the power of a collective love… A Community of Practice... A YA’LL.
The collective is the window to the world, not the individual. A community opens up beyond itself in ways and patterns that are not possible for the individual. This space of community is the playground of the Spirit. Christ says, “Where two or more are gathered I am there.” Access to Christ consciousness is not an individual experience but a communal one. A particular church or spiritual community is locally grounded and non-locally connected making it potentially a fuller reflection and agent of God’s Shalom than any individual Messiah could be. A community is the channel to the universal not the individual. This is also true in the Jewish tradition as well, where God chooses a “people” not a person as the vehicle for reconciliation. Maybe the Jewish and Christian stories involve communities and collectives because they hold greater potentiality for transformation than any one individual - even a highly awake individual. This is not to diminish the responsibility for us to all do our inner work of transformation, it just challenges us to complement and fulfill that work by entering into deep and committed communities of practice.
May we all wake up and get connected!
Peace,
Jud
